Letter to My Mother

During my father’s stay in the hospital, my mother was diagnosed with an advanced cancer. A year after his death, my sister called from Florida, this time to say that our mother was dying. My mother had left with my sister’s family on vacation. I bought a plane ticket. I never made it in time. I felt a visceral connection snap on the plane the same moment that she died in a Miami hospital. My parents’ death dug a deep hole inside me. I knew the blackness of empty space and it threatened me with annihilation. One moment my parents were there and then gone. I looked for logic and found none. At some point, I realized that my parents lived within me. I was their legacy. Life was a precious gift and not to be squandered.

Letter to My Mother
From the time I looked at my watch
I knew I wasn’t going to make it,
Driving past rows of palm trees in the taxi
Mourning the heat from 400 feet up in the Miami summer.

You’d dehydrated on the trip down
From the 24th floor of Co-op City in the Bronx
And died before I could touch your hand.
Not exactly the kind of vacation you had planned.

After the funeral someone squished
a grapefruit across the table from me.

Daddy had died a year before
In another hospital with a ceiling that bulged.
You couldn’t admit to yourself he was on his way out,
Made your daughters swear we would zip up our mouths.

Anyhow, that’s a bedtime story for sleepwalkers,
Almost 40 years after your last dream
Of diving from a rockweed-covered pier,
Sea bladders filled with air pops
That you sucked for the first three miles
Until you exhausted yourself
And were pulled down into the Witch’s lair.

You were the first one who taught me how to swim
At Orchard Beach, placed your hands
Beneath my stomach and told me to kick,
Not to be afraid, you would hold me.
But I always knew when you’d let go.

You would catch me then, beneath my belly,
A guppy that you brought home
From Woolworth’s one afternoon in a plastic bag
Filled with water, joked how my sisters
Had been rescued from a garbage can, strong stock
From the beer halls of Budapest to places
Where violets grew like gourds
Whose purple I’ve never seen.

Be there, and I would try to find you on the street,
In the high Magyar cheekbones of a woman
Waiting to order her half a pound of rye sliced without seeds.

I would attack any stranger with my hands and hug her knees.

–to be continued